New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “Something like … Odic force?” Brentford risked.

  “Ah! Od, neuric fluid, radiant matter—never mind the bottle, as long as you get drunk. My chief at the photographic lab, Baraduc, even tries to photograph these so-called auras, and he seems especially happy if he obtains a blurry, spotty cliché instead of a decent shot. The crown is quite simply an application of this. You suggest a patient while he wears this crown, and once he’s hypnotized, the effluvia charge the crown with the suggested instructions.”

  “And it does not work?”

  “Well, what do you think? Luys and Encausse say it does, of course. But there is very little you can prove or disprove when you’re working with suggested subjects, and I should know because this is my field of work. And as for effluvia, quite frankly it’s all codswallop.”

  Brentford nodded and thought he’d better withhold the information that he had travelled through Time, from a city not yet built, using a codswallop-powered vehicle.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this here, but I tend to side with Charcot’s archrivals, like Bernheim, who thinks that hypnosis is but a balance of power. Put a rich, educated, authoritative man in front of a poor, scared, sick girl and there is likely to be a lot of suggestion going on. But really, I’m one-sided about it. You should meet Encausse, who works at the Charité Hospital. And if you’re interested in effluvia, I think you should try to meet his good friend Colonel de Rochas. He runs the École Polytechnique, and he is now part of the Comité de Salut National, which is supposed to deal with weather conditions. Can you imagine that the man appointed to get us out of this chaos is actually persuaded that you have blue flames coming out of your skull? How improbable is that? Welcome to France, Monsieur Orsini.”

  Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and the improbable. Getting up, he thanked Jean-Klein profusely.

  A small, balding man suddenly interrupted, bursting into the room red with anger to howl something at Jean-Klein before storming away, all too quickly for Brentford to understand.

  “You just met Gilles de la Tourette, our chief,” Jean-Klein explained, “who is a member of the National Health Committee, too. We were just talking about the fantasies regarding hypnosis. Just imagine that less than two years ago, de la Tourette was shot three times at close range in the head by a woman who was persuaded that the doctors of the Salpêtrière had mesmerized her—remotely—against her will. She had also, it seems, written threatening letters to Rochas, who had probably sent her way some of his powerful male effluvia. It is a small otherworld, apparently.”

  “Well, nothing like a gun to reverse the balance of power.”

  Lavis smiled.

  “Indeed. Since then, and especially since Charcot’s death, de la Tourette has become very irritable, very rude—practically a case study for his own theory. I even suspect him of having a little bike in the head, as we say here. In any event, much to my regret I have to end this interesting conversation to get back to work.”

  They shook hands. “Have you been informed that Monsieur Leclou’s funeral is tomorrow at nine a.m at the Parisian Cemetery in Ivry?” Jean-Klein asked.

  “Thank you. We’ll be there. I suppose … you won’t.”

  Jean-Klein stared at Brentford in a thoughtful way. “I’ll be there more than I think, perhaps,” he finally muttered.

  Brentford was startled by the comment, but said no more before exiting.

  On his way out of the building, however, he was surprised to meet Thomas coming in. Thomas, in turn, looked rather embarrassed. “Hello,” he said, blushing.

  “You’re going back to the hospital?”

  “Yes, to check the plaster. It does hurt a bit,” he said with a wince, clowning a little.

  Brentford had never heard Thomas complain before, even in jest. It wasn’t his style. There was something fishy behind this. A girl? A nurse? A patient? He sighed, but he wasn’t Thomas’s father. Years of friendship with Gabriel d’Allier had taught Brentford that giving moral advice to friends often yielded results opposite to what was intended. Still, it was nevertheless with a worried brow that he headed towards the Seine.

  In spite of all that he needed to do, Brentford found himself loitering like a tourist. It was not yet November, and the Seine was already frozen solid, its bed cluttered with a jumble of bezeled ice blocks that shone in the pale, blurry sun like a miniature Arctic Sea. Muffled to the ears, he followed its banks, passing a few other stray strollers and watching children play among the blocks.

  The Jardin des Plantes, on his left, seemed eerily quiet, and he remembered having read in some English newspaper that the animals in its menagerie had been devoured by starving Parisians the previous winter. As this year’s winter was already even worse, Brentford worried about what on earth the people would eat this time, before realizing that, whether he liked it or not, he was now one of those people.

  Enormous pyramids of snow towered beside the bridge piles like so many shards of glaciers, and after a few puzzled seconds, he spotted the workers emptying their barrows of shoveled snow over the parapets. Other passers-by were engrossed in this spectacle, too, with the common male fascination with work that’s hard and that’s not one’s own. To Brentford it seemed a brave but futile labour, like trying to bail out a boat with a thimble. He remembered that he had been sent to help Paris learn not to fight the snow, necessarily, but to live with it, and he almost regretted having other worries on his mind. Maybe he should kill two birds with one stone before the cold killed them all and go to see Dr. “Papus” Encausse at the Charité Hospital to find out about the crown; or to the École Polytechnique to speak with Colonel de Rochas, the man Lavis said dealt with “weather conditions” and dabbled in effluvia.

  Deciding to decide on the way, he set off and soon noticed that the cold felt colder there than it did in New Venice. Maybe it’s not so much the cold you feel as the way a place copes with it, he mused. Maybe it was seeing an army of old women trying to clear snow heaps with brooms that sent shivers down his spine, he thought as he passed the wine market and crossed the rue des Fossés St. Bernard. And as to Gabriel, Brentford surmised, it was the sight of the dark-green, flaking bookstalls along the quay, shut down and with snow up to their rusty locks, that would make him turn up his collar and lengthen his stride.

  Then Notre-Dame flashed through dead branches to loom over everything, flaunting its indifference to the catastrophe. Brentford turned left to reach the Place St. Michel, and in a café on the corner, the Soleil d’Or, he had the pleasure—forbidden in New Venice as a “threat to literacy”—of using a telephone. He called the hotel and asked Gabriel to meet him. Taking a hoarse mumble for a yes, he sat down and ordered a croque-monsieur from a waiter whose attitude made it very clear that serving people did not make him their inferior—quite the contrary. Meanwhile, there on the Boul’ Mich’, as the locals called it, there were still a few attempts at circulation: the tramways were dead, of course, their rails buried under layers of off-white snow, but a few brave horse omnibuses were still hoofing it up and down.

  Gabriel appeared sooner than Brentford had expected. In accordance with the very New Venetian idea that extreme weather conditions were not an excuse for sloppy grooming, he was dressed to the nines-below-zero, in sixteen-holed boots, black velvet jodhpurs, a grey double-breasted jacket with a fur collar and a matching cap with its earflaps tied up on the top, showing a simple dressing on his wound instead of yesterday’s bigger bandage. Brentford noticed that he also carried a cane with a carved knob depicting the Polar Kangaroo.

  The sight of Gabriel attired like that warmed him for a moment—it was the closest thing to being in New Venice, except that they were still separated from it by an abyss of time.

  “Trekking back home, Gabriel?”

  “Going to get Orsini. The p
lumbing’s not right in my room.”

  “Before that, if you don’t mind, we’re going to the Charité Hospital to meet the inventor of the magical crown. You may have heard of him—Papus. A doctor, a high-ranking Mason, and one of the leading occultists in Paris.”

  “As you know, I’m more into the Widow’s daughters than into her sons,” Gabriel said with a grimace. “And what did our new friend the late Jean-Klein have to say about the crown?”

  His answer pleased Brentford twofold: first because Gabriel appeared to be in a more congenial mood, and second because his friend was finally showing some concern about their situation.

  “He was very dismissive about it. I didn’t dare tell him that I was probably talking to him because of one.”

  “He’ll change his mind when he gets to New Venice in twenty years or so. Imagine his life: he goes to New Venice, comes back to Paris in a time slip back to his youth, only to become the Jean-Klein who will go to New Venice … and then it starts all over again!”

  “If he ever gets back to New Venice, I’m not going to feel sorry for him,” Brentford said with a sigh—then added sombrely, “and if we ever make it back, I’d hate to have to go through this all over again.”

  Having paid (or, Brentford having paid), they left and crossed the square, stopping to observe for a moment the enormous fountain depicting the archangel Michaël trampling a winged, tailed Lucifer and plunging his lance into his accursed side. The basin was frozen and the chimeras on each side were spouting icicle oriflammes, as if, here too, time had stopped.

  “Pretty weird monument,” Brentford commented.

  “As a matter of fact,” Gabriel answered, pedantic in his good-natured way, “it was conceived as a reminder for the working class of the failed revolution of 1848. It reads something along the lines of ‘See what happens when you revolt.’ ”

  “The allusion was too subtle for the Communards, apparently.”

  “Ah, that’s the problem with the Great Unwashed, you see. They can’t even read tacky allegories. But they’ve been punished for their ignorance. They now get a big cream cake called the Sacré-Cœur hovering over their slums—as if France were begging forgiveness of God for letting the poor play with matches.”

  “I thought the French were rational,” Brentford said, although Jean-Klein’s pithy explanations had somewhat diminished his certainty.

  “Reason is just their excuse for their pettiness and their total lack of imagination. But to generalize is to be an idiot, and I’m sure that your witch doctor at la Charité will prove himself a very imaginative fellow.”

  La Charité, they discovered, was a lugubriously grey neoclassical hospital on the rue des St. Pères on St. Germain-des-Près, and it gave Brentford a brief spell of déjà vu. If the Salpêtrière looked like an army barracks, this hospital looked more like a prison.

  They told the concierge that they had found an object of value belonging to Dr. Encausse and that they wished to hand it over to him personally. This must have been a typical gambit to see the doctor, because the concierge barely reacted, simply pointing them to the room where Encausse gave consultations to outpatients.

  “All right,” Gabriel instructed Brentford as they entered, “the man deals with arcana. He is, at heart, a gullible fellow. We’ll just have to look dark, intense, evil—frowning over some intense metaphysical pain, our eyes burning with the fires of hell, crackling with magic—and he’ll be eating from our hands.”

  He took one look at Brentford.

  “No, not like that. You look like you’ve just eaten Eskimo food. Perhaps we should stick to the Masonic handshake.”

  From a distance, Encausse, a fat man in his thirties with a fuzzy, double-pointed beard, appeared affable and seemingly devoted to his patients, some of whom were gazing at him with moist eyes as if he were a holy man. Well, as long as the doctor did his job correctly, Brentford thought, it hurt no one that he spent his evenings chanting nonsense in a pentacle. And after all, who was he to mock people who believe in magic? He thought of Helen, what he had seen her doing, and what she had done to him. Back home, he and Gabriel had been exposed—no doubt more than “Papus” himself—to a more-than-healthy dose of the supernatural. The difference was that he and Gabriel at least had the decency to admit that they didn’t understand it. He respected mystics, but occultists, he reckoned, were like people who would draw a map of a place where they’d never been.

  Working hard to look secretive and deep, the New Venetians wedged themselves between the other patients to get in front of the doctor, and taking his palm in what they hoped was the proper handshake, introduced themselves as Brother De Kink and Brother Stinkson from Polaris Lodge number 186 in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. They mentioned that they had found a kind of crown that, they thought, worked in mysterious ways …

  Encausse looked very interested, and he explained earnestly, “I do not insist on separating my medical work from my other interests; quite the contrary, they are one and the same thing. It is my conviction that most diseases come from the disjunctions of the astral, which is the sole concern of occultists.”

  Brentford and Gabriel approved in unison, trying to look profoundly touched by the truth that had just been revealed.

  “However, as Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything. Allow me to finish my work here, and if you please, I will seek you out to discuss these matters as soon as possible in a small bookstore a few streets from here, Five rue de Savoie. It’s called Le Merveilleux. I truly hope I’ll see you there.”

  The Marvelous Bookstore was located in a knot of little narrow streets just off the Seine, nearer to the Latin Quarter. Gabriel had browsed about half of the shelves when the shop bell finally rang and Encausse appeared. After exchanging a few whispers with the owner Mauchel, a defiant man who had been staring at Brentford and Gabriel since their arrival as if they were going to cast a death spell on him from behind the stacks, the doctor took them into a little back room hung with black drapes and decorated with letters and symbols, two winged sphinxes, and a cardboard cutout of John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad. It looked like the set for the first act of a high school production of Faust.

  “This is our Martinist temple,” Papus explained, glowing at his own satisfaction. “It is becoming very successful. We will soon be opening an occultist school just across the street.”

  Brentford and Gabriel did their best to look impressed and interested.

  “So, you told me you had a certain object …” said Papus, with a sudden intense look that he supposed impressive.

  “Oh, yes, of course …” Brentford said, taking the crown out of his satchel and putting it on the desk between them.

  “Just as I thought …” Papus began, with a frown. “Before we talk about this, I am sure you won’t reproach me for expressing my curiosity about who you are, exactly.”

  Brentford had an inbred distaste for lying. Gabriel did, too. However, thanks to the complications of his amorous life, he had learned to live with it.

  “We come from a place very far to the north, and regard ourselves as very modest seekers on the path of authentic learning,” he said now. “Our Worshipful Master, the late Godfrey Daniel, 33°, 89°, has recently passed away, and we found him on his deathbed wearing the crown. He had told us shortly before that he had received some objects from Paris that would be his legacy to us, and his will made it clear that he was talking about the crown. But we do not know why he was wearing it when he died, nor what, exactly, it signifies.”

  “But you traced it back to me?”

  “You are the most famous Master in Paris. We thought that if anyone knew, it would be you.”

  “It is quite a coincidence, if such a thing as coincidence exists, that you came to me, because—I say it with humility—I happen to have invented these devices, with Dr. Luys. Their proper name is the couronne magnétique. But what I do not remember is having sent any of them anywhere. These are very rare, you understand. Have you any id
ea of how your Master got it?”

  “Much to our regret, we have no information for you on that,” Brentford intervened. Technically, it wasn’t a lie.

  Encausse frowned and nodded. “I suppose it will have to remain a mystery, then. In any case, I can still explain to you how they work … We discovered, in the wake of Mesmer, that you can affect the nervous centres by putting them in a magnetic or electromagnetic field. When it comes to directly influencing the brain, a magnetic crown is the most efficient tool. It not only records the brain’s activity; it also stores it and can transmit it, from the transferring subject to the receiving one, exactly like a phonograph.”

  Brentford started at the word transferring. Its connection to Transpherence, which he had thought about when meeting Lavis, came to him again, more strongly this time.

  Encausse continued, unaware. “Using this, I could transmit any kind of neuropathic symptoms from one patient to another: headache, vertigo, fainting spells, memory loss. One of Luys’ male patients, who unknowingly wore a crown charged two weeks earlier by a female subject, began walking and talking like a woman as soon as he put it on, and could barely be convinced that he wasn’t one. As you can imagine, it opens amazing perspectives. For instance, the strength from a healthy subject could be transferred to a depressed or excited brain.”

  “Contagion as cure,” Brentford said, as if to himself.

  “And all the more since the neuric forces accumulated in the crown do not fade immediately, and could very well be used to influence even a third subject. They are so persistent, in fact, that you have to wash or sometimes even heat the crown red-hot to get rid of the influence. All this, of course, could be indefinitely furthered.”

  “But tell me,” Brentford suddenly asked, “could the couronne magnétique affect temporality?”

  Encausse looked puzzled. “In what way?”

  “Hmm … Let us say that a couronne magnétique has been charged on a dying man, and then put on another person some days later. Does that second person’s sense of time recede by two days? Does he feel that he has somehow gone back in time? Does he forget the present he lives in?”